Usage scenario
Imagine your company relies heavily on its on-premises SAP BW system for business intelligence. You need to modernize your data landscape, integrate with cloud services, and leverage AI and advanced analytics. A complete SAP BW migration is complex and costly. This lesson explores the advantages of using your existing SAP BW data within SAP Business Data Cloud.
Key Benefits of Using SAP BW in SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP Business Data Cloud offers a powerful approach to modernizing your data strategy without completely replacing your existing SAP BW system. It seamlessly connects your SAP BW data to a cloud environment, unlocking new capabilities and integrations while avoiding the complexities and costs of a full migration.
This approach offers several significant advantages:
Preserving Existing Investments: Existing SAP BW data models and the investment made in them are retained. There's no need to rebuild data structures in the cloud; you leverage existing knowledge and infrastructure. This significantly reduces development time and costs.
Object Store: The object store (based on SAP HANA Data Lake Files) decouples data storage from compute resources and addresses customers with a large BW footprint to reduce associated storage costs. This provides greater efficiency, cost optimization, scalability and performance.
Effortless Data Access: SAP Business Data Cloud provides a managed environment for accessing your SAP BW data. This simplifies data access and management, eliminating the need for complex configurations and ongoing maintenance. Users experience a streamlined and user-friendly interface.
Integrated Data Provisioning: You can continue with the full range of SAP BW data provisioning and transformation options, push data from SAP BW into the object store of SAP Datasphere, and apply further transformation steps that are easier to model in SAP Datasphere or SAP Databricks. You can use SAP BW process chains to schedule and control the data provisioning.
Integration with Other Data Sources: SAP Business Data Cloud allows integration of your SAP BW data with other data sources, including semi-structured and unstructured data. This creates a more holistic view of your business data, leading to richer and more comprehensive analytics.
Fully SAP supported: SAP extends support for SAP NetWeaver BW until 2030, and SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Datasphere remain supported at least until 2040.
SAP Databricks: AI/ML: Integrating your SAP BW data with advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of SAP Databricks within SAP Business Data Cloud enables deeper insights and more informed business decisions. This unlocks the potential for predictive analytics and improved business outcomes.
Zero-Copy Data Sharing: SAP Business Data Cloud enables bidirectional data sharing with other solutions such as SAP Databricks without creating redundant data copies. This improves efficiency and reduces storage costs, optimizing resource utilization.
Data Product Delivery: SAP BW data can be exposed as data products. These data products can be shared with various data consumers across your organization, fostering better data accessibility and collaboration. This promotes data democratization and improved decision-making.
Combine with SAP Datasphere: Legacy and new data can be easily combined in a new SQL-based modeling approach without any constraints of a legacy deployment architecture.
The strategic modernization path offered by using SAP BW within SAP Business Data Cloud combines the stability and reliability of your existing SAP BW environment with the agility and scalability of the cloud. This unlocks the full potential of your data for advanced analytics and AI-driven decision-making, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.
Let’s Summarize What You’ve Learned
Key advantages of SAP BW modernization are:
Preserving existing SAP BW investments reduces redevelopment costs and time.
Simplified data access via SAP Business Data Cloud improves user experience and efficiency.
SAP BW data can be exposed as data products, enhancing collaboration.
Integration with other data sources provides a holistic view for richer analytics.
AI-enabled insights from integrated data lead to better business decisions.
Further Reading
For further information, read the SAP help pages: